Assimilating tougher for children of immigrants

April 19, 2009|By Jason Deparle The New York Times

LANGLEY PARK, Md. — Class at the youth center had just let out, and a gaggle of teenagers moved toward the door, turning saggy pants and ring tones thrumming with reggaeton hits into adolescent statements of Latino cool.

Some had criminal records, and some had babies. Most had immigrant parents with menial jobs. They were children of the Washington suburbs, but the poverty and violence around them rivaled that of urban cores.

About one in four youths in the United States are immigrants or children of one. And nationwide, about half of immigrants live in the suburbs. Many live in places that do little to promote immigrant prosperity even in good times; now, vanishing jobs and strained safety nets increase the risk of downward assimilation.

In the past, the work of helping immigrant families largely occurred in established gateways, cities like New York or Chicago with mature safety nets. Today's immigrants are widely dispersed, often in places that are not used to their presence and unprepared to meet their needs.

Raised in blighted neighborhoods, alienated from parents and school, disheartened by the prospect of dead-end jobs, these youths risk joining what some scholars have warned could be a "rainbow underclass."

On average, children of immigrants today are progressing, with levels of earnings and education similar to peers whose parents are native born.

"Most children of immigrants are doing well," said Alejandro Portes of Princeton the sociologist who with Ruben G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, coined the phrase "rainbow underclass," "But a sizable minority is certainly left behind and in danger of downward assimilation."

Portes estimated that as many as 20 percent face elevated chances of long-term poverty - suggesting a risk pool of more than 3.5 million. While he predicts that only a minority of that group will experience the depth of disadvantage implied by the word "underclass," he says their numbers are large enough to warrant the concern of policymakers.

The problems of young people like Jesselyn Bercian, an American-born daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, are sometimes called failures of assimilation. But they also can be seen as assimilation to the wrong things: crime, drugs and self-fulfilling prophecies of racial defeat.

As Jesselyn, 19, tells it, she assimilated to the surrounding values of gangsta rap. Writing in her eighth-grade yearbook, she celebrated friends as "my nigga!" and labeled enemies "crackers," "bamma" and "whyte."

"If you're Hispanic, people already expect you to steal, to fight, to be rude, to be ghetto," Jesselyn said. "If everyone thinks wrong of you, eventually you're going to start thinking wrong about yourself."